SEO is all about driving high-quality organic traffic to your website. One of the best ways to attract that traffic is by providing your audience with the answers they want right when they want them. Fortunately, there is a particular type of content that does this better than any other: comprehensive guides. These guides are your ticket to providing your audience with the information they need, building your authority and driving more high-quality traffic to your site.
In this tutorial we are going to break the topic of writing comprehensive content into three key topics:
- What are Comprehensive Guides?
- Benefits of Comprehensive Guides
- Instructions for creating Comprehensive Guides
If you don’t get all the way through this tutorial in one sitting, we recommend you bookmark it and come back to it when you are ready to start driving more quality traffic.
What are Comprehensive Guides?
An ultimate guide, or comprehensive guide as we like to call it, is content that goes into great detail about a topic relevant to your business.
A form of thought leadership content, comprehensive guides (a.k.a. cornerstone content, definitive guides, ultimate guides, beginner’s guides, etc.) give you the ability to channel your expertise into content that will rank well because your audience will really want to read it.
To familiarize yourself with the types of content we are talking about, check out this Ultimate Guide to Ultimate Guides and explore some of the different types of content it includes.
While creating these guides might seem time-intensive, crafting one can happen a lot quicker than you might think and be far more impactful than you would expect.
Benefits of Creating Comprehensive Guides
Provide Potential Customers & Clients with Valuable Information
Comprehensive guides are packed with highly valuable information in the form of essential knowledge and actionable insight. When you provide your audience with this kind of content, they are more likely to come back to you for more.
Position Your Business as an Authority
Every time you create an ultimate guide, you show people your expertise. This gives prospective customers, and Google, more reasons to trust you, your business, and your website.
Acquire Links
These guides are great at attracting backlinks, especially when paired with a proactive outreach strategy.
Improve Your Rankings
One of the most important ranking factors in Google is RankBrain. RankBrain focuses on two key factors:
- Dwell Time: How long a Google searcher spends on your page.
- Click-Through Rate: The percentage of people that click on your webpage in the search results.
Ultimate guides are a great way to please the RankBrain algorithm because they keep people on a page longer and prevent people from bouncing or pogo-sticking to find better results.
Capture Position Zero & Voice Search Results
Featured snippets are blocks of content that are featured in the search engine results. They contain content extracted from a webpage. These results are often described as “position zero” as they rise above the traditional organic search results.
Studies also show that voice search results are often pulled from “position zero” content.
Ultimate guides are a great way to leverage your expertise in a way that resonates with search engines and encourages them to place your content in featured snippets.
Now that you know what these comprehensive guides are and how they can benefit your business, let’s take a look at how to create them.
Overwhelmed by SEO? Try a
guided approach.
How to Create Comprehensive Content
Don’t just start writing about a topic. While it might create an interesting piece of content, it will likely have more gaps than a more structured one.
Here is a process to follow to create comprehensive guides:
Final Thoughts
Comprehensive guides, although an incredibly useful tool, shouldn’t be used as a standalone blog tactic. They can act as great cornerstone content and supplement a diverse set of content types that you publish as blogs.
Try creating one and you might discover one of the most powerful tactics in your SEO tool belt.
Erik Wardell
Erik loves breaking down complex SEO topics into understandable instructions anyone can follow. In his role as an SEO coach, he guides Pathfinder SEO customers through the SEO process on a daily basis, giving them helpful tips, instruction, and advice along the way.